Post by RedFlag32 on Dec 30, 2007 13:45:45 GMT
I posted this because it seemed at first glance to touch on some important issues which we could apply to Ireland,the idea of a vanguard party etc...I dont have much backround knowledge on the said organisation so if anyone knows more let it be known. 
Our revolutionary party-building perspective and the Socialist Alliance
www.dsp.org.au/site/ (More info)
[The following is an edited report and summary to 22nd DSP Congress presented by Peter Boyle on behalf of NE majority. The general line of the report and summary was adopted with the votes of 45 out of 60 delegates and 30 out of 40 consultative delegates. There were no abstentions.]
Introduction
The working class is the main social force in the struggle to replace capitalism with socialism. For socialism to be more than an idea it has to be a political movement of the working class. This proposition is at the heart of Karl Marx’s theory of socialism.
In advanced capitalist countries such as Australia, wage workers are the main producers, and the working class is the largest class, constituting more than 80% of the population. The labour of wage workers is indispensable to the economic life of modern capitalism, and is the main source of capitalist profit.
The central place of wage workers in the productive process gives them the social power to overthrow capitalism. No other social class or group has the power to achieve this.
Since the beginning of the 20th century all the necessary material conditions have existed within the imperialist countries and on a world scale for this social revolution. But the existence of the necessary material conditions is by itself insufficient. Unlike all previous social transformations, the socialist revolution demands conscious action by the working class and its allies. Socialism can only be achieved through the united action of millions of working men and women conscious of their social interests and the steps necessary to realise them.
The need for a revolutionary party
The principal task of earlier social revolutions was to sweep away outmoded relations of production and the institutions defending those relations, thus clearing the way for the already spontaneously developing new mode of production.
However, because the socialist revolution seeks to substitute socially-planned economic development for the existing system of exploitation of the producers, the new system cannot develop spontaneously once capitalism is abolished. It requires the conscious restructuring of social relations to eradicate the division of society into classes.
The socialist revolution is also the first process of fundamental social change in human history to be carried out by the lowest social class. Unlike the capitalist class, which carried out its social revolution after it had developed considerable economic power and had accumulated a large amount of managerial experience, the working class can only realise its potential economic power and gain managerial experience after it has overthrown the old social order. And to do so it has to overcome a very powerful and influential capitalist ruling class.
All of this conditions the strategy, tactics and organisation of the working class in its struggle for power.
The main weapon of the working class in its fight against capitalism is the potentially immense power of its collective action. The working class is capable of spontaneously engaging in vast struggles around immediate objectives, and of reaching the level of class consciousness necessary to create mass organisations (such as trade unions, strike committees) suitable for waging these struggles.
But such spontaneous action is insufficient to create the level of political consciousness, or to achieve the unity of action, required to overthrow capitalist rule and reorganise society along socialist lines.
Under capitalism, and for a considerable time after its overthrow, the working class is marked by uneven political consciousness stemming from the different conditions under which its members live and their different experience in struggle.
Moreover, the capitalist class deliberately fosters divisions within the working class and in society as a whole, granting privileges to some while systematically discriminating against others. Think: Tampa, Cronulla Beach.
During periods of intense mass struggle, large numbers of people become receptive to socialist ideas. In times of relative social passivity, the working class is more easily dominated by ruling-class ideology.
For all of these reasons, the working class cannot as a whole or spontaneously acquire the political class-consciousness necessary to prepare and guide its struggle for socialism. So we need a party uniting all who are struggling against the abuses and injustices of capitalism and who have developed a socialist consciousness. We need a party that persists through the rise and falls of the social movements.
The role and character of the revolutionary party
We need to build a mass revolutionary party to provide leadership to the struggles of the working class, not only for better terms for the sale of labour power and to win and defend progressive social reforms but for the abolition of the very social system that gives the rich control over the entire well-being of working people.
In the absence of such a party, the valuable experiences of groups of militant and politically conscious workers and other fighters tend to be isolated and lost.
But a party capable of undertaking such colossal tasks cannot arise spontaneously or haphazardly. It must be built continuously, consistently and consciously. This requires determined and systematic work aimed at winning influence in all sectors of the mass movement, and persistent attention to recruiting new members, training them to become professional revolutionary activists.
We need a party of principled opposition to the rule of the capitalist class and one that constantly seeks opportunities to organise the broadest masses for effective anti-capitalist political action.
If a revolutionary party is to avoid the dangers of sectarian isolation, it is necessary to maintain the closest contact with the broad masses of the working people and all the progressive social struggles of the day. Through this daily involvement with the realities of the struggle the party’s ideas are constantly modified and tested, and in this process the party makes judgments about appropriate organisational forms and its role in the existing political situation.
Ultimately, only a revolutionary socialist party that has deep roots in the working class, that is composed primarily of workers, and that enjoys the respect and confidence of the workers, can lead the oppressed and exploited masses in overthrowing the political and economic power of capital.
The central aim of the DSP is to build such a mass revolutionary socialist party in Australia.
If what I have said so far sounds familiar it is because it is pretty much word for word from the Program of the DSP on socialist strategy and tactics. It’s the closest thing we have to an “I believe”.
I’ve gone through this because it goes to the heart of the debate we have had in the pre-congress discussion. In the opinion of the National Executive/National Committee majority - and as the draft resolution states unambiguously - there are real and significant forces moving left-ward in the working class, forces that we are relating to, on a broad political basis, through building the Socialist Alliance as a new party project.
However, the NE/NC minority has argued strongly that this political opening does not exist and that it is just an opening that we wish existed. That’s the heart of our disagreement.
In the course of debate, the minority has begun to challenge our very concept of party-building strategy and tactics and has begun to distort our history, the lessons we have drawn from it and from struggles of other revolutionaries. So I am going to go through some of our history and our political heritage.
Our past left regroupment efforts
From the early 1980s to the early 1990s our party acted on every single opportunity we found to unite with real progressive forces in political motion.
In 1984, we initiated the Social Rights Conference to try and bring together forces opposed to the ALP-ACTU Accord. If only we then had the alliances we have with militant unionists that we have today!
Later that year we threw our efforts into building Nuclear Disarmament Party.
In 1986 and 1987, we explored to the fullest extent possible building a new left party with the previous Communist Party of Australia.
Then in 1988 and 1989, our party made every effort to unite with the Socialist Party of Australia (which has since renamed itself the CPA).
Then in the late 1980s and early 1990s we were involved in various Green alliances, including the formation that became the NSW Greens. We even helped draft slabs of their platform that survive today.
Left regroupment has never ever been there to be had – like a prepared dinner ready to be eaten. It has always been a struggle and so it is today in the Socialist Alliance. Many of the challenges we face today in the Socialist Alliance were also faced in our previous regroupment attempts in the 1980s.
Not a single one of those openings in the 1980s was an immediate opening to quickly build a new mass workers party. Yet we dived in and pursued these openings, just as the majority argues we need continue to pursue today’s regroupment openings through the Socialist Alliance, albeit with the appropriate tactical adjustments.
The suggestion that the regroupment openings in the 1980s offered quick roads to a mass party is a fiction born of hasty and careless polemic in the pre-congress discussion.
It is true that when Labor junked its anti-uranium policy in 1984, the NDP did grow fast – on the back of the already existing mass anti-nuclear campaign. Our party, then the Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP), jumped in to help that process by setting up NDP branches, becoming full-time NDP organisers and helping set up party-like structures for the fledging organisation. By early 1985, the NDP’s impact was being felt. In the elections, 642,435 people had cast their primary vote for the NDP, and thousands of members had joined in just a few months. It had won one Senate seat, and nearly won a second.
But while quite a few left-wingers from the ALP joined they did not, in general, put their hands up to take responsibility for the NDP’s organisation. Those who did, besides us were the more small-l liberal types (and the comrades assigned to full-time NDP organising became reluctant to do it over time for this reason). The NDP was a very loose party, and in no way socialist. The activity levels of the great bulk of its members (and there was difficulty getting agreement on who was a member and who wasn’t) barely extended beyond a bit of election campaigning.
As Comrade Greg Adamson explained in a 1999 Green Left Weekly article on that experience:
The party included a hugely diverse membership. Strong support was gained from the working-class industrial cities of Newcastle and Wollongong to the wealthy Sydney eastern suburbs. Hundreds of experienced and sceptical older political activists rubbed shoulders with enthusiastic and optimistic teenagers.
To forge a single political party from this range required patient, careful building of trust around practical and effective campaigns against the nuclear menace. However, the party's opponents were anything but willing to give the NDP the breathing space it needed. This external pressure was successful in causing a central core of high-profile leaders to doubt the possibility of building the NDP. (1)
So don’t imagine that the NDP was an example of an easy road to a new mass party. It was a struggle, which then turned into a conservative split led by Peter Garrett, Jo Vallentine and others.
If the New Left Party, the project we pursued with the old CPA, had been formed in the late 1980s, how big do you think it would have been? Probably not much bigger than the SA today. Maybe 1000 members, and most of them would have had the same average activity level of SA members. And what would have been the politics of most of these members? Their politics would have ranged from revolutionary Marxist to liberal left, with a fair few outright opportunists thrown in as well. We even had debates over 1985-86 about how prominent, or if at all, the “s” word should be in the new party’s name and its charter.
What union militant force would the New Left Party have pulled in had it succeeded? The CPA had a few union officials, but they were unlikely to have brought in an active militant trade union current such as the one we are currently engaged with via the Socialist Alliance. Their union officials had been unwilling to criticise the smashing of the Builders’ Labourers Federation, and some had even supported the Accord.
Our efforts at unity with the Socialist Party of Australia would have, if it had succeeded, given us a new party of about 500 members, quite a significant proportion of whom would have been inactive. To be generous, the SPA could have brought in about 70 activists, but many of them would have been 65 or older. They may have had another 200 inactive members on top of that. The SPA did have a number of union militants, mainly on the waterfront, but most were on the verge of retirement or had already retired. Indeed, the attraction of fusion with the SWP-DSP for some of these good old worker militants in the SPA was precisely the fact that we would bring in the young activists they knew were needed if the left was to have a future.
Lessons drawn in the 1990s
Did we later reconsider this approach to party building? Did we draw the conclusion that after all these failed regroupment attempts, our “real” party-building strategy was always just to build the DSP?
The NE minority report, given by Comrade John Percy, to our October 2005 NC quoted a paragraph from Jim Percy’s party-building report at the DSP NC, October 7, 1991:
One of the things we’ve done is to try every tactic to break out of our isolation. That’s what we did in the 1980s, and there’s a sort of danger in doing that, in and of itself – in downplaying the importance and permanency of our party, in unsettling comrades who start to look for a breakthrough or even begin to confuse our ideas with the less formed ideas of others on the left. (2)
John then added, “We had to emphasise the party again then, party-building and recadreisation!” and argued that now we have to do the same again. So this short quote from a report by Jim Percy in 1991 was enlisted to support the minority report’s proposition that our “central strategic task” is building the DSP as our party while the Socialist Alliance should be an auxiliary tactic to advance this strategic task.
It is very misleading to take that particular paragraph of Jim’s 1991 report out of context. But it taps a certain minority mood in the DSP’s membership today – one of nervousness and uncertainty about how we are faring and some pessimism about the objective conditions. It is not hard to understand where this is coming from. Comrades are worried about the small size of Resistance, low Green Left Weekly sales, etc. In addition, there is Howard’s legislative blitzkrieg following the Coalition obtaining a majority in both houses of federal Parliament and the still low morale of many social movement activists (the milieu that most influences the DSP membership).
We have put into place measures (both political and organisational) that are successfully addressing the recadreisation challenge and the need to strengthen Resistance. I will come back to this later in the report and the DSP tasks and youth work reports will take this up in greater detail.
But we also need to note the differences in objective conditions between 1991 and 2005. The context of Jim’s October 1991 report was a huge global defeat: the collapse of the Soviet Union. Today, we are not on the edge of a whole period of global retreat. If anything we are coming out of that period. As the international situation report presented by Comrade Kerryn Williams set out yesterday, there is the new revolutionary upsurge in Latin America (around the Venezuelan Revolution), imperialism is bogged down in an unwinnable war in Iraq, and in Australia we have just witnessed the biggest workers’ protest in this country’s history. And this is not just our hopeful view of the international situation. It is the view of the Cuban and Venezuelan revolutionaries.
We need to understand the context without hype or undue pessimism, and I think the draft resolution sums up the objective conditions in a careful and balanced way. In contrast, the minority report to the October 2006 NC and the minority report on the Australian political situation both had a much bleaker analysis.
Party-building strategy and tactics
Jim Percy’s October 1991 report went on to review various different party-building tactics and I will go through these, but first let us reiterate what our party-building strategy is, because the tactics must serve the strategy. Our party-building strategy is to build a mass revolutionary vanguard party of the working class. All our party building tactics should advance that strategy. We know that the vanguard status of such a party has to won in struggle. We know that no party can decree itself a vanguard – such status can only be won through struggle, and we certainly can’t say that the DSP is now that vanguard, or will necessarily be the form that such a vanguard will take. So we do not see our party-building strategy as building the DSP, full stop.
We also know we want to build a mass party of revolutionaries who are united around a program and prepared to act in a disciplined way, but that the unity and discipline is based on the political authority and respect that has to be won through successful leadership in actual struggle. That is the political point in the famous clowning and phrase-mongering quote from Left-wing Communism. (3)
Lenin’s argument was that the discipline and unity required of a party that can lead a revolution is only built up politically through the class consciousness of the vanguard of the working class, its ability to link up with the broadest masses and ability to exercise political leadership over the masses. He said: “Without these conditions all attempts to establish discipline inevitably fall flat and end up in phrase-mongering and clowning. On the other hand these conditions cannot emerge at once. They are created only by prolonged effort and hard-won experience.”
Back in Jim Percy’s October 1991 report, you can read of the different kinds of party-building tactics we have used to advance out party-building strategy:
Entrism, essentially a hostile tactic of entering a broader organisation to break it up and recruit from its ranks (a tactic which we have only attempted in the ALP and Young Labor);
New party regroupment, seeking to regroup the socialist left, which in this country today includes mostly unorganised leftists;
Fusions, which we successfully conducted with the Communist League in the 1970s and failed with the SPA in the 1980s; and
Regroupment with broader left-ward moving elements, essentially what we attempted with the NDP and the Greens.
Through much of the 1990s, new regroupment openings did not arise. I remember discussions at our conferences then when some comrades asked why we were not creating such openings and remember replying that we can’t just create such openings because we understand that they will be necessary as part of our struggle to build a mass vanguard party. Some comrades thought there might be an opening when the Progressive Labour Party was formed. But our comrades in Melbourne concluded it was not a real opening. So building the DSP was our central party-building tactic in those years. We more or less held our own in membership, rising and falling a little with the movements.
But in the 1990s we also applied the regroupment tactic by replacing our party newspaper Direct Action with a broad, non-party newspaper project, Green Left Weekly. We did try to use the Green Left Association as an organizational form around which to attempt some degree of regroupment. While that did not really work, Green Left Weekly has kept and built up a broad political periphery. A significant part of this periphery has now become loosely organized in and around the Socialist Alliance.
Our 2002 decision to try and build the Socialist Alliance as a new party project was a combination of the second and fourth tactics described above. But it also had a new aspect because in all our previous regroupment attempts we faced stronger opponents within the project, whether it was the opportunist stars in the NDP or, the CPA. We faced an uphill battle even to win a basic democratic framework necessary to develop the politics of those projects.
In contrast, in the Socialist Alliance we were the initiators and the strongest force. While we made concessions we also quickly established a basic democratic framework and a political platform that allowed us to campaign in elections and in the movements. The initial modest progress with a loose regroupment with a number of smaller socialist groups, which is how the Alliance began in 2001, gave us a platform to attempt a regroupment with broader forces, including militant trade unionists and wider layers of leftists inspired and emboldened because of this link. (4)
Our revolutionary party-building perspective and the Socialist Alliance
www.dsp.org.au/site/ (More info)
[The following is an edited report and summary to 22nd DSP Congress presented by Peter Boyle on behalf of NE majority. The general line of the report and summary was adopted with the votes of 45 out of 60 delegates and 30 out of 40 consultative delegates. There were no abstentions.]
Introduction
The working class is the main social force in the struggle to replace capitalism with socialism. For socialism to be more than an idea it has to be a political movement of the working class. This proposition is at the heart of Karl Marx’s theory of socialism.
In advanced capitalist countries such as Australia, wage workers are the main producers, and the working class is the largest class, constituting more than 80% of the population. The labour of wage workers is indispensable to the economic life of modern capitalism, and is the main source of capitalist profit.
The central place of wage workers in the productive process gives them the social power to overthrow capitalism. No other social class or group has the power to achieve this.
Since the beginning of the 20th century all the necessary material conditions have existed within the imperialist countries and on a world scale for this social revolution. But the existence of the necessary material conditions is by itself insufficient. Unlike all previous social transformations, the socialist revolution demands conscious action by the working class and its allies. Socialism can only be achieved through the united action of millions of working men and women conscious of their social interests and the steps necessary to realise them.
The need for a revolutionary party
The principal task of earlier social revolutions was to sweep away outmoded relations of production and the institutions defending those relations, thus clearing the way for the already spontaneously developing new mode of production.
However, because the socialist revolution seeks to substitute socially-planned economic development for the existing system of exploitation of the producers, the new system cannot develop spontaneously once capitalism is abolished. It requires the conscious restructuring of social relations to eradicate the division of society into classes.
The socialist revolution is also the first process of fundamental social change in human history to be carried out by the lowest social class. Unlike the capitalist class, which carried out its social revolution after it had developed considerable economic power and had accumulated a large amount of managerial experience, the working class can only realise its potential economic power and gain managerial experience after it has overthrown the old social order. And to do so it has to overcome a very powerful and influential capitalist ruling class.
All of this conditions the strategy, tactics and organisation of the working class in its struggle for power.
The main weapon of the working class in its fight against capitalism is the potentially immense power of its collective action. The working class is capable of spontaneously engaging in vast struggles around immediate objectives, and of reaching the level of class consciousness necessary to create mass organisations (such as trade unions, strike committees) suitable for waging these struggles.
But such spontaneous action is insufficient to create the level of political consciousness, or to achieve the unity of action, required to overthrow capitalist rule and reorganise society along socialist lines.
Under capitalism, and for a considerable time after its overthrow, the working class is marked by uneven political consciousness stemming from the different conditions under which its members live and their different experience in struggle.
Moreover, the capitalist class deliberately fosters divisions within the working class and in society as a whole, granting privileges to some while systematically discriminating against others. Think: Tampa, Cronulla Beach.
During periods of intense mass struggle, large numbers of people become receptive to socialist ideas. In times of relative social passivity, the working class is more easily dominated by ruling-class ideology.
For all of these reasons, the working class cannot as a whole or spontaneously acquire the political class-consciousness necessary to prepare and guide its struggle for socialism. So we need a party uniting all who are struggling against the abuses and injustices of capitalism and who have developed a socialist consciousness. We need a party that persists through the rise and falls of the social movements.
The role and character of the revolutionary party
We need to build a mass revolutionary party to provide leadership to the struggles of the working class, not only for better terms for the sale of labour power and to win and defend progressive social reforms but for the abolition of the very social system that gives the rich control over the entire well-being of working people.
In the absence of such a party, the valuable experiences of groups of militant and politically conscious workers and other fighters tend to be isolated and lost.
But a party capable of undertaking such colossal tasks cannot arise spontaneously or haphazardly. It must be built continuously, consistently and consciously. This requires determined and systematic work aimed at winning influence in all sectors of the mass movement, and persistent attention to recruiting new members, training them to become professional revolutionary activists.
We need a party of principled opposition to the rule of the capitalist class and one that constantly seeks opportunities to organise the broadest masses for effective anti-capitalist political action.
If a revolutionary party is to avoid the dangers of sectarian isolation, it is necessary to maintain the closest contact with the broad masses of the working people and all the progressive social struggles of the day. Through this daily involvement with the realities of the struggle the party’s ideas are constantly modified and tested, and in this process the party makes judgments about appropriate organisational forms and its role in the existing political situation.
Ultimately, only a revolutionary socialist party that has deep roots in the working class, that is composed primarily of workers, and that enjoys the respect and confidence of the workers, can lead the oppressed and exploited masses in overthrowing the political and economic power of capital.
The central aim of the DSP is to build such a mass revolutionary socialist party in Australia.
If what I have said so far sounds familiar it is because it is pretty much word for word from the Program of the DSP on socialist strategy and tactics. It’s the closest thing we have to an “I believe”.
I’ve gone through this because it goes to the heart of the debate we have had in the pre-congress discussion. In the opinion of the National Executive/National Committee majority - and as the draft resolution states unambiguously - there are real and significant forces moving left-ward in the working class, forces that we are relating to, on a broad political basis, through building the Socialist Alliance as a new party project.
However, the NE/NC minority has argued strongly that this political opening does not exist and that it is just an opening that we wish existed. That’s the heart of our disagreement.
In the course of debate, the minority has begun to challenge our very concept of party-building strategy and tactics and has begun to distort our history, the lessons we have drawn from it and from struggles of other revolutionaries. So I am going to go through some of our history and our political heritage.
Our past left regroupment efforts
From the early 1980s to the early 1990s our party acted on every single opportunity we found to unite with real progressive forces in political motion.
In 1984, we initiated the Social Rights Conference to try and bring together forces opposed to the ALP-ACTU Accord. If only we then had the alliances we have with militant unionists that we have today!
Later that year we threw our efforts into building Nuclear Disarmament Party.
In 1986 and 1987, we explored to the fullest extent possible building a new left party with the previous Communist Party of Australia.
Then in 1988 and 1989, our party made every effort to unite with the Socialist Party of Australia (which has since renamed itself the CPA).
Then in the late 1980s and early 1990s we were involved in various Green alliances, including the formation that became the NSW Greens. We even helped draft slabs of their platform that survive today.
Left regroupment has never ever been there to be had – like a prepared dinner ready to be eaten. It has always been a struggle and so it is today in the Socialist Alliance. Many of the challenges we face today in the Socialist Alliance were also faced in our previous regroupment attempts in the 1980s.
Not a single one of those openings in the 1980s was an immediate opening to quickly build a new mass workers party. Yet we dived in and pursued these openings, just as the majority argues we need continue to pursue today’s regroupment openings through the Socialist Alliance, albeit with the appropriate tactical adjustments.
The suggestion that the regroupment openings in the 1980s offered quick roads to a mass party is a fiction born of hasty and careless polemic in the pre-congress discussion.
It is true that when Labor junked its anti-uranium policy in 1984, the NDP did grow fast – on the back of the already existing mass anti-nuclear campaign. Our party, then the Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP), jumped in to help that process by setting up NDP branches, becoming full-time NDP organisers and helping set up party-like structures for the fledging organisation. By early 1985, the NDP’s impact was being felt. In the elections, 642,435 people had cast their primary vote for the NDP, and thousands of members had joined in just a few months. It had won one Senate seat, and nearly won a second.
But while quite a few left-wingers from the ALP joined they did not, in general, put their hands up to take responsibility for the NDP’s organisation. Those who did, besides us were the more small-l liberal types (and the comrades assigned to full-time NDP organising became reluctant to do it over time for this reason). The NDP was a very loose party, and in no way socialist. The activity levels of the great bulk of its members (and there was difficulty getting agreement on who was a member and who wasn’t) barely extended beyond a bit of election campaigning.
As Comrade Greg Adamson explained in a 1999 Green Left Weekly article on that experience:
The party included a hugely diverse membership. Strong support was gained from the working-class industrial cities of Newcastle and Wollongong to the wealthy Sydney eastern suburbs. Hundreds of experienced and sceptical older political activists rubbed shoulders with enthusiastic and optimistic teenagers.
To forge a single political party from this range required patient, careful building of trust around practical and effective campaigns against the nuclear menace. However, the party's opponents were anything but willing to give the NDP the breathing space it needed. This external pressure was successful in causing a central core of high-profile leaders to doubt the possibility of building the NDP. (1)
So don’t imagine that the NDP was an example of an easy road to a new mass party. It was a struggle, which then turned into a conservative split led by Peter Garrett, Jo Vallentine and others.
If the New Left Party, the project we pursued with the old CPA, had been formed in the late 1980s, how big do you think it would have been? Probably not much bigger than the SA today. Maybe 1000 members, and most of them would have had the same average activity level of SA members. And what would have been the politics of most of these members? Their politics would have ranged from revolutionary Marxist to liberal left, with a fair few outright opportunists thrown in as well. We even had debates over 1985-86 about how prominent, or if at all, the “s” word should be in the new party’s name and its charter.
What union militant force would the New Left Party have pulled in had it succeeded? The CPA had a few union officials, but they were unlikely to have brought in an active militant trade union current such as the one we are currently engaged with via the Socialist Alliance. Their union officials had been unwilling to criticise the smashing of the Builders’ Labourers Federation, and some had even supported the Accord.
Our efforts at unity with the Socialist Party of Australia would have, if it had succeeded, given us a new party of about 500 members, quite a significant proportion of whom would have been inactive. To be generous, the SPA could have brought in about 70 activists, but many of them would have been 65 or older. They may have had another 200 inactive members on top of that. The SPA did have a number of union militants, mainly on the waterfront, but most were on the verge of retirement or had already retired. Indeed, the attraction of fusion with the SWP-DSP for some of these good old worker militants in the SPA was precisely the fact that we would bring in the young activists they knew were needed if the left was to have a future.
Lessons drawn in the 1990s
Did we later reconsider this approach to party building? Did we draw the conclusion that after all these failed regroupment attempts, our “real” party-building strategy was always just to build the DSP?
The NE minority report, given by Comrade John Percy, to our October 2005 NC quoted a paragraph from Jim Percy’s party-building report at the DSP NC, October 7, 1991:
One of the things we’ve done is to try every tactic to break out of our isolation. That’s what we did in the 1980s, and there’s a sort of danger in doing that, in and of itself – in downplaying the importance and permanency of our party, in unsettling comrades who start to look for a breakthrough or even begin to confuse our ideas with the less formed ideas of others on the left. (2)
John then added, “We had to emphasise the party again then, party-building and recadreisation!” and argued that now we have to do the same again. So this short quote from a report by Jim Percy in 1991 was enlisted to support the minority report’s proposition that our “central strategic task” is building the DSP as our party while the Socialist Alliance should be an auxiliary tactic to advance this strategic task.
It is very misleading to take that particular paragraph of Jim’s 1991 report out of context. But it taps a certain minority mood in the DSP’s membership today – one of nervousness and uncertainty about how we are faring and some pessimism about the objective conditions. It is not hard to understand where this is coming from. Comrades are worried about the small size of Resistance, low Green Left Weekly sales, etc. In addition, there is Howard’s legislative blitzkrieg following the Coalition obtaining a majority in both houses of federal Parliament and the still low morale of many social movement activists (the milieu that most influences the DSP membership).
We have put into place measures (both political and organisational) that are successfully addressing the recadreisation challenge and the need to strengthen Resistance. I will come back to this later in the report and the DSP tasks and youth work reports will take this up in greater detail.
But we also need to note the differences in objective conditions between 1991 and 2005. The context of Jim’s October 1991 report was a huge global defeat: the collapse of the Soviet Union. Today, we are not on the edge of a whole period of global retreat. If anything we are coming out of that period. As the international situation report presented by Comrade Kerryn Williams set out yesterday, there is the new revolutionary upsurge in Latin America (around the Venezuelan Revolution), imperialism is bogged down in an unwinnable war in Iraq, and in Australia we have just witnessed the biggest workers’ protest in this country’s history. And this is not just our hopeful view of the international situation. It is the view of the Cuban and Venezuelan revolutionaries.
We need to understand the context without hype or undue pessimism, and I think the draft resolution sums up the objective conditions in a careful and balanced way. In contrast, the minority report to the October 2006 NC and the minority report on the Australian political situation both had a much bleaker analysis.
Party-building strategy and tactics
Jim Percy’s October 1991 report went on to review various different party-building tactics and I will go through these, but first let us reiterate what our party-building strategy is, because the tactics must serve the strategy. Our party-building strategy is to build a mass revolutionary vanguard party of the working class. All our party building tactics should advance that strategy. We know that the vanguard status of such a party has to won in struggle. We know that no party can decree itself a vanguard – such status can only be won through struggle, and we certainly can’t say that the DSP is now that vanguard, or will necessarily be the form that such a vanguard will take. So we do not see our party-building strategy as building the DSP, full stop.
We also know we want to build a mass party of revolutionaries who are united around a program and prepared to act in a disciplined way, but that the unity and discipline is based on the political authority and respect that has to be won through successful leadership in actual struggle. That is the political point in the famous clowning and phrase-mongering quote from Left-wing Communism. (3)
Lenin’s argument was that the discipline and unity required of a party that can lead a revolution is only built up politically through the class consciousness of the vanguard of the working class, its ability to link up with the broadest masses and ability to exercise political leadership over the masses. He said: “Without these conditions all attempts to establish discipline inevitably fall flat and end up in phrase-mongering and clowning. On the other hand these conditions cannot emerge at once. They are created only by prolonged effort and hard-won experience.”
Back in Jim Percy’s October 1991 report, you can read of the different kinds of party-building tactics we have used to advance out party-building strategy:
Entrism, essentially a hostile tactic of entering a broader organisation to break it up and recruit from its ranks (a tactic which we have only attempted in the ALP and Young Labor);
New party regroupment, seeking to regroup the socialist left, which in this country today includes mostly unorganised leftists;
Fusions, which we successfully conducted with the Communist League in the 1970s and failed with the SPA in the 1980s; and
Regroupment with broader left-ward moving elements, essentially what we attempted with the NDP and the Greens.
Through much of the 1990s, new regroupment openings did not arise. I remember discussions at our conferences then when some comrades asked why we were not creating such openings and remember replying that we can’t just create such openings because we understand that they will be necessary as part of our struggle to build a mass vanguard party. Some comrades thought there might be an opening when the Progressive Labour Party was formed. But our comrades in Melbourne concluded it was not a real opening. So building the DSP was our central party-building tactic in those years. We more or less held our own in membership, rising and falling a little with the movements.
But in the 1990s we also applied the regroupment tactic by replacing our party newspaper Direct Action with a broad, non-party newspaper project, Green Left Weekly. We did try to use the Green Left Association as an organizational form around which to attempt some degree of regroupment. While that did not really work, Green Left Weekly has kept and built up a broad political periphery. A significant part of this periphery has now become loosely organized in and around the Socialist Alliance.
Our 2002 decision to try and build the Socialist Alliance as a new party project was a combination of the second and fourth tactics described above. But it also had a new aspect because in all our previous regroupment attempts we faced stronger opponents within the project, whether it was the opportunist stars in the NDP or, the CPA. We faced an uphill battle even to win a basic democratic framework necessary to develop the politics of those projects.
In contrast, in the Socialist Alliance we were the initiators and the strongest force. While we made concessions we also quickly established a basic democratic framework and a political platform that allowed us to campaign in elections and in the movements. The initial modest progress with a loose regroupment with a number of smaller socialist groups, which is how the Alliance began in 2001, gave us a platform to attempt a regroupment with broader forces, including militant trade unionists and wider layers of leftists inspired and emboldened because of this link. (4)